There we were, eating breakfast this morning, when Chris starts humming the theme from the 1960’s Batman show as he’s reading the local news online.

It seems that somebody is building a “bat bridge” in Biberach, a town in Baden-Württemberg.

And no, “bat bridge” doesn’t have a different meaning in German. The 2 bridges they are constructing — at a cost of 400,000 euros — are to be used by bats to cross the road.

It turns out that bats are a highly protected species here in Baden-Württemberg. When a road was recently built that cut across the normal hunting area for the local bats, it disrupted their “line of sight” for getting around. “Line of sight” is in quotes here as the bats, of course, are as blind as …

Well, you get the idea.

Anyway, bats use sonar to get around, and the changes in the landscape caused when a road is built (hedges torn down, etc.) fiddle with the bats’ ability to navigate through the new terrain – apparently, they don’t reset their sensors. As a result, they will improperly cross too low to the roadway, at great risk to live and limb – er wing, as it were. The bridges that are being built will be used by the bats to cross over the roadway at a safe distance above the cars.

Now, you’re probably wondering how the bats will be told to use the bridge, right? I mean, do you just put up signs in the forest saying, “Hey, this way to the bridge, Mr. Bat?”

Of course, that brings to mind something I read a couple of weeks ago about a woman who called into a radio station to complain that she felt deer-crossing signs in the U.S. were always put in places that were too dangerous for deers to cross. She wanted the signs moved so the deers would know where it was safe to cross. She honestly thought the deer crossing signs were for the deer to read, in order to know to cross the road.

No really, I’m not making that up, it’s a real story: you can read it about at the end of this article here.

Getting back to the bats, thankfully no one here was silly enough to think that they needed to put up signs for the bats to read. As we’ve already covered, bats can’t see, so of course they can’t read. No, the way the bats will be alerted to the presence of the man-made bridges is by means of an ultrasound device that will send out sonic transmissions to the bats.

I.e., Each bat bridge will have its own “bat signal”.

But of course.

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As part of the bat bridge building project here in Germany, there’s also funding for a multi-year study to see if the bridges actually work to guide the bats across the road. People on this project might want to get in touch with folks from a group Chris and I ran across this morning when we decided to find out more about why bats are a protected species.

The Bat Conservation Trust (BCT) is a British group devoted to the preservation and protection of bats. It turns out that bats are so highly protected in the UK that you can be fined a rather large amount for merely accidentally disturbing a bat’s resting place. According to Wikipedia, there are 4 Bat Bridges in England, all of which have been in place for a few years now. So, you’d think someone there would already know if a bat bridge actually gets used by bats.

The BCT has quite an extensive mission, actually, and they even have a Bat Helpline available as well. There’s also a “Bat Crimes” section of their website that covers what to do if you see a crime being committed. That’s a crime against a bat, not by one. Bruce Wayne is not currently listed among the Board of Trustees, but I see that they have a couple of openings, so maybe he recently retired.

Now, I mentioned a while back that I’m a fan of the 1960 tv show, The Avengers. It strikes me that the BCT is like all the unusual groups Mrs. Peel and Steed used to encounter in those shows: a group with a single, slightly wacky (to me, at least) purpose that would invariable have a representative providing eccentric background information about things like “Monitoring Bats”, or “Training and Best Practices for Professionals”, two areas listed as subjects on the BCT website. I guess the script writers of that show were doing affectionate pastiches of the types of groups that actually exist in England – who knew.

The groups Mrs. Peel and Steed met, though, would always have a cute acronym from their name. Therefore, using the title from another section of the BCT website, might I suggest a better name for the group: the Bat Trust for Education and Engagement.

i.e. Bat T.E.E.

Read it aloud. It sums up my feeling on the idea of a bat bridge.